


That Time When Mikleo And Edna Were Dating

by ImJustNutty



Series: Things That Go Bump In Your Sleep [2]
Category: Tales of Zestiria
Genre: F/M, Humour, M/M, not crack pairing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-17
Updated: 2015-12-17
Packaged: 2018-05-07 06:36:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5446796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ImJustNutty/pseuds/ImJustNutty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mikleo will tell Sorey about everything that happened while he was asleep, except for the one thing Sorey really wants to know. Past Mikleo/Edna, implied Sorey/Mikleo (about as much as the game implies), background Zaveid/Lailah. Comes after the events of Waltz of Warm Winds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	That Time When Mikleo And Edna Were Dating

**Author's Note:**

> "Mikleo/Edna?! Are you CRAZY." I can hear you yelling at me. I think I'm crazy too. I actually shipped it when I first played it. I always play as Mikleo and as Edna's fellow background-magic-caster whenever anything runs over to whack Edna (despite her defense being higher than Mikleo's) I get ol' Meebo to run after and give them a thwap with his staff.  
> The game doesn't really give you much material to work with when it comes to Lailah, Zaveid and Edna. I feel that honestly they could have had a lot more chemistry, platonic or otherwise, with each other as a whole. Unfortunately for the sake of the spammage of Sorey/Mikleo interactions we lose out on a lot of other possible interactions. So there we go-- fanfiction fix its.

Oversleeping can easily result in someone missing out on things. Sorey used to miss breakfast time (and then get an earful from Gramps) after sleeping late into the mornings, when Mikleo forgot/couldn’t be bothered to wake him up/got tired of knocking and kicking at the main door without getting a response.

Still, Sorey thought it very unfair now that he 1) didn’t _oversleep_ , because the sleep was an unfortunate side effect so Maotelus could work his magic and restore the world back to its un-malevolence-saturated state, and 2) you miss out on things _way_ more serious than breakfast when you’ve been asleep for about three hundred years.

The worst part was, Mikleo refused to divulge any details about the time he was apparently dating Edna.

After Lailah and Zaveid bid them farewell and left, Sorey wanted to run after them to ask them to explain _what exactly they’d meant and please tell me all the details_ but Mikleo had asked him to do something or another immediately after that. Probably something like cleaning one of the new pieces of furniture he hadn’t had before. Mikleo had refurnished Sorey’s house while he was…indisposed, and now it had at least two more bookshelves (all stocked with Mikleo’s own books, and the odd one that Lailah and Zaveid wrote), an actual dining table, a writing desk, and strangest of all, a vanity.

“A table with a mirror? Whatever for?” Sorey had asked about three days into living in his house, which now felt very foreign to him. He remembered what his house looked like, despite having become a seraph and sleeping for so long. He had way too many memories of his childhood and growing up with Mikleo in that house to forget it. And now that it was so different, it was just…bizarre.

“Some of us care about our appearances more than others,” said Mikleo, as he sat in front of it, brushing his very long hair. “Some of us could stand to care more about their appearances too. And by that, I mean you.”

After the obligatory tickle-fight that ensued, Sorey thought about it. Mikleo had always been somewhat concerned about his appearance, but the vanity looked distinctly out of place in Sorey/Mikleo’s house.

Sorey didn’t think about it further, but it resurfaced in his mind after Mikleo brought him to Edna’s place. Edna had returned to Spiritcrest Mountain, which was now much more populated. She lived in a shrine at the top of the mountain, where plenty of pilgrims and dedicated humans visited to pay their respects. Now that the malevolence had settled and there were less disasters around, Edna hung around the mountain more often, making it easier for Mikleo and Sorey to catch her.

Sorey saw a familiar yellow figure at the base of the mountain. Her bright yellow hair was longer, and still in a single side ponytail. Her umbrella seemed new, too, and her dress was to her ankles, with a more regal appearance. It was odd that she somehow looked older now, but to Sorey it felt like he’d just seen her a week ago.

“It’s nice to see you finally awake, Sorey,” Edna said in her usual monotone, but even she couldn’t help but break into a smile when they approached.

“Did you come all the way down to meet us? How nice of you,” said Mikleo, with a warmer smile than Sorey could have ever imagined him giving to Edna. Or maybe he was overthinking things. They did always say he was dense as a rock.

“To meet Sorey, yes. Had I known you’d be here, I’d have waited higher up to drop a boulder on you,” she replied, but the smile on her face remained as sincere as ever.

As they continued up the mountain path, Sorey noted the flowers along the path. Someone had cut a proper road through the mountain, making it much easier to walk up. There were even stairs cut into the steeper parts of the slopes, and someone had considerately placed stone benches at regular intervals.

“That was me, yes,” muttered Edna, opening her umbrella and walking ahead. “I was tired of elderly visitors fainting and falling down the stairs. I don’t like having to heal half the people who visit me.”

“About eighty years ago, during a minor civil war within Hyland, Edna went all the way down to heal all of the injured,” said Mikleo with a sly smile to Sorey, while looking at Edna’s umbrella.

Edna whipped around, closing her umbrella. “That was because I wanted to stem the malevolence,” she retorted, clearly annoyed.

“So you keep saying,” Mikleo said, cheerfully. Sorey grinned as Edna huffed and continued marching up the path.

Eventually they reached the shrine, which was quite modest. At the back of the shrine was a small room, high enough for only Edna to pass through without having to bend over. “Watch your head. I built this room myself without intending to entertain many guests. That big dent above the door is where Zaveid always hits his head every time he visits.”

“Why don’t you just shape the doorway to be bigger? You…can do that, right?” asked Sorey.

“Of course I can, who do you take me for?” replied Edna. “It’s fun to see Zaveid curse in all the dead languages he knows, though. It’s the only time I get to hear them.”

And as Sorey squeezed through the doorway, his eyes settled quickly onto a very familiar piece of furniture.

“MIKLEO THAT’S YOUR MIRROR-TABLE THING.”

Edna and Mikleo stared at him blankly, before Mikleo realised what “mirror-table thing” referred to, and his face turned red. Edna turned to see what Sorey was so rudely pointing at.

“Oh, you mean my vanity.” And then her eyes widened.

“Um. Well. Yes, I, uh, well, no point in throwing out good furniture,” stuttered Mikleo, covering his face with one hand like he always did when he was embarrassed. To Sorey’s surprise, Edna’s face seemed slightly red too.

“W-well. You were always very vain. Your hair’s longer than mine.” Edna quickly changed the topic by shoving them both into chairs at her small coffee table, setting cups of tea into their hands and all but throwing lots of fascinating books at Sorey. He was curious, but those books _were_ very fascinating. Edna was quick to regale him with stories of the normins’ misadventures, her subsequent related misadventures, their new colonies around the continent, and there was that castle where the normin used to live which were now ruins due to their inability to manage households unless Atakk was involved.

“You’d probably be interested in seeing their castle,” she said, pouring herself another cup of tea. “Lots of Columbian accents in their pillars, with inspirations from the Aldrenian era.”

“Never was that big a fan of Aldrenian,” he replied. “Too many accessory ornaments, which _sometimes_ didn’t even match the rest of the design. Ornamentation purely for the sake of its extravagance.” Sorey shook his head.

“Well, the normin are fans of beauty. Practical aspects of design aren’t necessary when the normin don’t eat or sleep,” Edna replied, tapping a finger on her chin thoughtfully.

They chatted about other things, nibbling on butter cookies that Edna had made. They tasted nostalgic, and he ended up eating about half the plate. Mikleo shook his head.

“Now I’ll have to roll you down the steps,” he said, as Sorey grinned through a mouth covered in crumbs.

Eventually, they left Edna’s shrine, with promises to visit soon. It was dark as they walked down the stairs, their path only illuminated by the torch that Mikleo had thoughtfully decided to bring. They made it about halfway down the mountain before Sorey couldn’t contain himself anymore.

“You _totally_ dated Edna,” he hissed, almost accusingly at Mikleo. Mikleo nearly tripped, and the torch swung around. Sorey caught him by the arm, and Mikleo roughly shook his arm free.

“W-where’s this coming from?”

Sorey shook his head. “Oh, Mikleo. Do you really think I’m that dense? You have the same mirror-thing…”

“Vanity,” Mikleo grumbled.

“…as she does, she knows about ancient architecture and design, and she has your secret butter cookie recipe!” Sorey grinned triumphantly in the darkness, not caring that Mikleo couldn’t see it.

Mikleo didn’t reply, and they continued walking down in complete silence but for the occasional howling of the wind.

“Um,” said Sorey, after about ten minutes of complete silence.

“I’m thinking of how to reply to that,” muttered Mikleo.

“Oh.” Sorey frowned, disappointed. Was he wrong?

“Well….you’re…..not……wrong.” The words were so widely spaced that Sorey wondered if they were supposed to be in the same sentence. Mikleo practically whispered the last word that Sorey thought he’d imagined it. They continued walking for about a whole solid minute in silence.

“Well, say something,” snapped Mikleo. The torchlight flicked to the side briefly as Mikleo swung his arm in exasperation.

“Oh. So, you did,” gaped Sorey.

“Y-yes.”

“Well. Why didn’t you tell me? And, you guys aren’t together anymore, right?” Sorey sighed, crossing his arms. “Is it because you don’t feel comfortable telling me these things? Three hundred years is a long time…”

“No!” said Mikleo, almost shouting. The circle of light on the ground went somewhere else again. “Well, okay. Maybe. But, not that I’m not comfortable telling you things, but, well.” Sorey grabbed Mikleo’s arm so the torch was still shining on the ground. “Oh, sorry. But I mean, I…just felt odd talking about it. It was…a long time ago. And things changed. And…I guess I thought you’d think it really weird.”

“Weird?” Sorey thought about it. “Yeah, it’s really weird. I thought you guys were always getting on each other’s nerves. Mostly, Edna getting on your nerves. Calling you Meebo and all the other variations.”

“Uh. Yes. Well. Things changed.”

“…….what do you mean?”

“I meant what I said.”

“Ever heard of elaborating, Mikleo?”

“I’m not telling you,” said Mikleo, firmly, in a voice that suggested that Sorey might end up sleeping outside in the garden if he pushed any further. Sorey kept his mouth shut for the rest of the next fifteen minutes, before asking about the normin castle Edna had mentioned.

 

 

If Mikleo thought that Sorey would let the thing about Edna go, he was sorely wrong.

“So did Edna make the vanity herself?”

“…yes.”

“And she gave it to you?”

“No, she just liked it a lot and refused to get any other one we could find in Ladylake or Marlind, so she made me cut down a tree near the Mabinogio ruins so she could make it.” Mikleo put a hand on the surface of the vanity, and then he looked up sharply at Sorey’s reflection in the mirror in surprise at what he had revealed. “Please wipe that smile off your face, Sorey. I shouldn’t have said that.”

When Sorey finally managed to keep a straight face, he added, “It’s a nice vanity.” For that, Sorey got a substantial amount of water appear above his head and drench him thoroughly. He thought it was worth it.

 

 

Mikleo was a bit smarter about Sorey’s subtle probing thereafter, and so Sorey decided to flip through the many books on the shelf. He’d started working through Mikleo’s sequels to the Celestial Record, but they were objectively written and a catalogue of historical events rather than his friends’ lives. He peered at the other titles on the shelves. There was _Zaveid’s Guide to Love and Romance_ , apparently written before he’d ended up with Lailah, and by the looks of it Mikleo hadn’t opened it at all to read. There was a coffee mug stain on the cover, so he probably used it as a coaster for his cups. Put to good use, indeed. Edna had written a humungous tome on _Normin: How to Deal With the Vermin That Threaten Our Sanities_ , which was useless to Sorey’s purposes.

He needed to find Mikleo’s personal diary, Sorey decided. Mikleo used to keep a journal when they were younger. Sorey could only hope that Mikleo still kept one. Hopefully with more interesting tidbits in it. Ten-year-old Mikleo’s journal only wrote about the day’s adventures.

He needed to have a plan.

 

 

It wasn’t easy. With Sorey awake and Maotelus’ domain maintaining general peace and tranquillity, there literally wasn’t anything for the seraphs to do.

“Which means we’ve got plenty of time to catch up on ruin exploring, museum visiting and whatever else you want to do!” said Mikleo when Sorey had inquired as to when Mikleo might be busy and out of the house. Unfortunately, Mikleo, being the very organised person that he was, had compiled a long list of activities to do and places to visit that Sorey had never done. Because Mikleo knew Sorey that well, he had picked out things that he knew Sorey would love.

And he was right about literally everything on the list.

Damn Mikleo for knowing him so well.

While Sorey _really_ couldn’t wait to visit the National Museum of Arthurian History, he had been distracted for too long. It had been two months since they visited Edna, and the trail was growing cold. So he formulated a plan that he would have to put into action on that day.

“Mikleo, could you do me a favour and deliver this letter to Lailah?”

“Lailah?” Mikleo frowned. “We are going to see her tomorrow at her birthday celebration, though. Why don’t we just pass it to her then?”

“Because it’s the decoy present,” he said, pressing the letter firmly into Mikleo’s hand. “I’m going to make her a cake, but she won’t expect it because she’ll think the present I’m giving her is the card you’ll pass to her!”

Sorey knew that his inability to lie would be his undoing. So he created this situation where everything he said was the truth. That should do the trick.

And it appeared to work. “While that is the strangest and most roundabout plan I’ve ever heard, I’ll go along with it,” agreed Mikleo. After tending to a thousand tiny chores and taking what seemed to be a million years, Mikleo left the house to look for Lailah. He assured Sorey that he would be back within the next four hours, because Lailah and Zaveid were in Ladylake.

Sorey took fifteen minutes to make the cake and shove it into the oven, and about ten minutes to find the journals. There were about fifty thick leatherbound tomes hidden in a large gap under the boards below the bed. Fifty books over the past hundred years, according to the meticulously dated entries. He must have thrown the previous ones away.

He sat on the bed and thought. The normin museum had been built eighty years ago, and apparently Edna had been personally involved in its building. When they visited, the normin guide had added that Edna had actually suggested the insertion of Adrenian hangings and light fixtures. So Edna and Mikleo would have had been together before then. Lailah and Zaveid had mentioned that they had been together for about thirty years.

Which meant there was only one of the books that could have anything relevant. Sorey dug down to the bottom the stack, and unearthed the half-rotted book. “First entry, written …a hundred years ago.”

_Entry 1_

_Today Edna and I went to assist the Rolance flood relief efforts. The recent influx of hellions from the Depression are making the efforts more difficult._

_Edna’s efforts in helping the people amaze me. Even though we’ve been ~~dating~~ together for over ten years now it’s actually really touching to see how much she really cares about others. In the past two hundred years she’s really developed a love for humans. _

_She trimmed my hair today, said it was getting too long. It’s still very long, but she tied it up in a way that I actually like (unlike Lailah, who keeps trying to get me to braid my hair). I’ll probably stick to it for now._

_Entry 2_

_Today we took a break. And by taking a break, I mean Edna made me cut down a tree, and she spent the day building a table out of it. Which is still better than her bugging me to drag her stupid vanity from Rayfalke Spiritcrest to Elysia._

_It’s mesmerising to see her work. She’s perfected her finer control of earth-based elements throughout her long life. The carvings along the edges of the table are very intricate and beautiful. I secretly tried to see if my water artes could carve anything like that into stone. All I managed was a crude imitation._

_Entry 3_

_She found my crude imitation. It only took her four hours to stop laughing._

Sorey flipped through the rest of the book. Other than the regular updates on relief efforts and malevolence containment expeditions, there were similar anecdotes (which were all equally adorable, in Sorey’s opinion).

_Entry 71_

_Today Edna asked me to teach her how to make lemon cookies. I have never needed to throw away that many batches of ruined cookies since Sorey and I were children. Still, she’s persevering, and eventually we made a batch that didn’t immediately cause severe diarrhoea. She makes the most intricate decorations, though._

Beneath this entry was a black and white barely discernible photograph of what appeared to be decorated cookies. Photography had been invented within the past three hundred years, and Mikleo had shown him what cameras could do. He knew Mikleo developed his own photographs, and knew they took a lot of effort.

_I told her that Sorey used to make lemon cookies in star shapes, and she teased me and said that she was proud of me for being able to mention Sorey without crying._

Huh. There was a large ink blotch there, as though Mikleo had left the pen tip pressing into the paper for a long time before writing what followed.

_Till now she thinks that she’s just Sorey’s replacement. But she’s wrong. She’s her own person, and we’ve had our own history. Sorey will always be there in my heart, but she’s not his replacement. Edna’s got her own section in my heart._

_I hope she’ll understand that someday._

Sorey pursed his lips, and looked up sharply as the smell of burnt cake wafted over. He bolted to the oven, tore open the oven door and pulled the cake tin out. Thankfully, only a small corner of the cake was scorched. He’d slice it off later, and would just need to make ….about double the amount of icing than originally required. Hopefully nobody would notice that a fifth of the cake was icing.

He ran back to where he’d left the book, beside the bed, and flipped through it. Toward the end of the book the entries had fewer mentions of Edna, and suddenly there was a noticeable absence of mentions of Edna.

So they really had been together. And by Sorey’s calculations by Mikleo’s journal entries, it had been for about thirty years.

The front door opened, and Mikleo entered the house. Sorey’s instinct was to brutally shove the books back into the hole beneath the bed, but didn’t want to ruin them. So he sat there, book in hand, as Mikleo walked into the bedroom.

“Ah, so you found them,” he said, as though reporting that the weather was clear today.

“You aren’t mad at me,” noted Sorey.

“Well, I’m kinda surprised you waited till now. I was expecting this.” Mikleo walked over and sat on the bed, next to Sorey. “I wanted you to know about it, I just…didn’t want to have to say it.”

“Huh. Well, okay. I get if you don’t want to talk about it,” said Sorey, looking down at the book.

“What about you? Are you…angry?”

“Huh? About what?”

“That I was, um, with Edna?”

Sorey looked at Mikleo blankly, while Mikleo studied his knees. “Why would I be? I mean, if you guys were together now, I’d be happy for you. Unless you weren’t happy, then that would suck.” Sorey frowned. “Or if being with Edna meant that you wouldn’t hang out with me at all, then that would suck too.”

Mikleo sighed heavily. “Always so selfless. You haven’t got an ounce of selfishness in you at all.”

“Did things not…work out? Is that why you and Edna broke up?” asked Sorey.

Mikleo thought for a while. “You know, I don’t really know. I mean, we ended up together because we worked together for a while, and…I guess, we got to know each other better. And she told me more about herself and….it seemed like a good idea at the time. It was a long time ago, I don’t remember it that well.” He turned away from Sorey. “It comes with the loneliness of living for so long, I guess. Someone else who’s been around for that long, all alone. That was the biggest thing we had in common. The thing with Eizen, she never really got over it. And I guess I was getting over you.”

“But I wasn’t dead…”

“Sure felt like it,” said MIkleo, monotonously. “It was awful. From having someone permanently by your side your whole life, and then _poof,_ the next couple hundred years without that. It’s a lot longer than the time I _did_ spend with you, but it was still hard.” The corner of his mouth twitched upward in a half smile. “It was nice to have her around, even if it was unexpected.”

Sorey stared at his own feet, guilt rising within him. He knew that he had subjected Mikleo to a lot of pain when he went into his slumber, but he knew he couldn’t regret it. Mikleo wouldn’t forgive him if he did.

“It was a good thirty two years, Sorey. But eventually we came to an amicable parting. We’re still friends, obviously, but we’re just not….romantically involved anymore.” Mikleo stood up, and plucked the book from Sorey’s hands. Without opening it, he walked out of the bedroom and stuck it onto an empty slot on the bookshelf.

“Why don’t you put it back in storage?” asked Sorey, following him out into the main room.

Mikleo looked at the book on the shelf, fingers still resting lightly on its spine. “I suppose I want to keep this one, after all. And maybe it isn’t something I should pretend doesn’t exist. It belongs here on the shelf, with the rest of my history.”

Sorey grinned, leaning against the wall. “Also, it’s kinda hilarious how you refuse to say the word ‘dating’.”

“Shut up and let’s fix that abomination of a cake you’ve made.”

 

 

 

At Lailah’s birthday party held in Sorey and Mikleo’s garden, Mikleo and Edna were setting up the buffet table as Lailah and Zaveid dragged Sorey into the house.

“I heard you told him about what happened between us,” said Edna, conversationally, as she arranged the jam drops on the multi-tiered plates daintily with a pair of chopsticks. “How did he take it?”

“I didn’t exactly…tell him,” said Mikleo, stacking the dinnerware at one end of the table. “He did his own digging and found out.”

“I see. Let me guess, the word ‘dating’ never crossed your lips,” said Edna with a small smile.

Mikleo ignored the warm flush that rose to his face. “O-of course I said we d-dated.”

“You’re cute when you’re red like that. Matches your mostly white hair.”

Sorey burst out of the house, hands over his ears, and tore his way down the streets of Elysia. The other seraphs in the neighbourhood stared at him, and when Sorey turned and saw Mikleo and Edna staring at him, he turned red and continued running toward the main gate of Elysia, shouting “NANANANA NOT LISTENING NANANANANA” with his hands still on his ears.

Mikleo turned to see Zaveid and Lailah emerge from the house. “What did you guys say to him?” he asked, bewildered.

Lailah smacked Zaveid on the shoulder, as Zaveid burst out laughing. “I asked him if he’d asked you the one important question about dating Edna.”

“Which was?” asked Edna, casually strolling over to her umbrella which was leaning against a chair.

Zaveid’s grin widened. “How good the sex was when you guys lived here in yer private love shack!”

 

The stories go that Zaveid’s body took three days to dig out from the ice that Edna and Mikleo encased him in, even with Lailah’s fire powers.

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Amicable breakups where they're still best buds! The best kind of breakup.  
> I have a headcanon that Sorey becomes a fire seraph, because maybe Shepherds who become seraphs take after their Prime Lord's element. Does that make sense? Who knows, maybe if they elaborated more on it in the game, it might.


End file.
